Recently, the Troy City Council announced plans to erect
the Armenian Heritage Memorial in the Riverfront Park of the city. According to
the Troy Record article, the planned memorial in this New York State town named
after the historic landmark in Turkey will be used to "honor victims of
the Armenian genocide, as well as those of all genocides".

Yet the claims of alleged "Armenian genocide"
remain a subject of political and historical controversy. The World War I-era
inter-communal atrocities in the Ottoman Empire were never tried in any
competent tribunal and no intent to exterminate Armenians was established. No
court verdicts were issued to interpret these events in terms of the 1948
United Nations Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The
International Court of Justice - the sole authority to apply the 'genocide'
term to any crime - has never opened a case or drawn a conclusion on these
allegations. The claim that 1.5 million Armenians allegedly perished during World
War I is rejected by most independent scholars of Ottoman history as well as by
population censuses. Finally, neither the U.S. Government nor Congress
recognizes "Armenian genocide."

Furthermore, between 1914 and 1918, armed bands of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation massacred an estimated 518,000 ethnic Turks
and other Muslims in Eastern Turkey. So, the attempts to memorialize only the
Armenian suffering remain deeply insensitive toward the memory of those
Turkish victims and insulting to all Turkish-Americans.

I join all Turkish- and Turkic-Americans, members of the
Pax Turcica Institute, in calling upon the Troy City Council to reconsider its
decision to erect the monument unless it equally recognizes the Turkish
suffering during World War I. I appeal to the diverse community of Troy, N.Y., to reject the attempts by some elected officials to serve as judges of
history and to misuse public assets for anti-Turkish propaganda.